The invention relates to systems and methods for providing small business owners with centralized control over transactions and accounts, and more particularly to systems, methods and software products that provide a user with control over a financial transaction that occurs between different financial service providers, including different online financial service providers.
Online banking services promise individuals and small companies significant increases in the efficiency of managing business accounts and corporate financial transactions. The online banking industry is expected to grow significantly over the coming years as more and more small business begin to leverage the Internet as a ready mechanism for transferring funds, purchasing services and goods, and managing corporate accounts.
However, although the promise of efficient online financial services has been repeatedly made over the last several years, the online banking services that exist today are, in truth, incomplete and difficult to employ. As such existing online banking services fail to provide to small business and individuals those key factors that are necessary for a customer to achieve the efficiencies they require. These efficiencies include ease of use, the ability to delegate authority for performing financial transactions sufficient features to perform those transactions necessary for conducting the day to day business of a small company, and a simple and intuitive interface that allows a customer to readily perform the desired transaction.
Today there exist many online banking systems that allow a consumer, small business, or other entity to control, transfer, and monitor the funds maintained within a banking account. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,220,501 which describes an online banking system that allows a user to control the funds within a checking account from a remote terminal, such as a computer system from a users home. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,903,881 describes a personal online banking system with integrated online statement and checkbook user interface that also provides an online banking system that allows a user to control their checking account from a remote location.
These systems generally work well for individuals interested in remotely monitoring their personal checking account, saving account or other personal bank accounts. Therefore such systems can be quite effective at helping an individual manage their personal finances.
However, the financial accounts of a small business are significantly more complicated than the financial accounts of an individual and can involve transactions for making payroll, 401K transactions, health insurance transactions, retirement plans, managing a plurality of corporate credit cards, and other such transactions. Its further common that a small business purchases different financial service from different financial service providers, either because no single service provider is capable of providing all the necessary or because there are economic advantages to choosing multiple service providers over a single financial service provider. Therefore it is quite common for a small business owner to utilize the banking services of one financial institution and the payroll services of a different financial service provider. Similarly, the same business may choose a special service provider to manage mutual funds and another financial service provider for securing corporate credit cards. Accordingly a small business can be left with a plurality of different SP, each of which may optionally provide online access to the company""s account. Although the online access may provide the company with convenient access to that service provider""s account information, the company is still left with having to manage a plurality of different accounts each of which has separate online access controls including different user interfaces, different passwords and different functions. Thus the user is left with having to administer a plurality service systems. This can be quite a cumbersome and labor intensive process one of which many companies find distracting from the main corporate mission. Moreover have a plurality of different accounts makes it difficult to delegate authority for administering a different accounts. For example, a small company may provide the company comptroller with access and authority to administer funds from the company""s checking account, payroll, 401K plan, and other accounts. However, if the comptroller were to leave the company, the remaining corporate officers would be faced with having to go into each online service and change the user account information to remove the user account previously provided to the comptroller thereby insuring that the departed comptroller can no longer access corporate financial information.
Accordingly, although online financial services exist today these systems are generally cumbersome to employ and fail to provide a small business with the services required for managing the day to day financial transactions of the company. Accordingly there is a need in the arc for a system that provides a facile to use financial service that provides the small business with the tools and service required to manage the financial structure of the company. There is a further need for systems that provide a small business with central control over all the companies accounts or a plurality of the company""s accounts thereby allowing he small business owner to grant or restrict access to company accounts readily.
The invention provides a tool kit for a small business owner to manage a plurality of different financial accounts to perform a number of different financial transactions, wherein each of the transactions involves multiple sub-transactions which occur among different financial service providers. For example, the system provides an integrated package that integrates financial service providers, such as a payroll service provider, a retirement plan service provider, a healthcare service provider or another type of service provider. The system provides one interface to a subscriber and the subscriber can select from the interface a financial transaction to perform. For example, one transaction that can be selected by the subscriber is to xe2x80x9cPay Payroll.xe2x80x9d Upon selecting this transaction at the user interface, the subscriber""s computer sends an instruction to a webserver that coordinates transactions between different providers. The webserver interprets the instructions to pay payroll as an instruction to transfer money from a xe2x80x9cCash Money Accountxe2x80x9d (CMA) into a checking account, and from the checking account, deliver money to the payroll service provider for making the payroll. The systems and methods described herein perform the middle-level computing and processing that negotiates the financial transactions which are to occur through each of the service providers in order to perform this compound financial transaction. For example, the system can transmit to the CMA service provider instructions in a format understood by the CMA service provider and having the information necessary for the CMA service provider to transfer money from the CMA account into a cash account or savings account that can be employed by the payroll service provider. For example, the server can provide to the CMA financial service provider an instruction including information such as a user ID, a PIN number, the amount of money necessary for making payroll, an instruction representative of the account into which money should be transferred from the CMA account, and any other suitable information that the CMA service provider needs to transfer money from the CMA account. Similarly, the system can provide instructions to the payroll service provider that direct the payroll service provider to prepare payroll checks for each of the employees currently of record at the payroll service providers data center. Similarly, the server can provide to the payroll service provider information that is representative of a user ID number, a PIN number, an access control number, or any other type of information that is required by the payroll service provider to perform the financial transaction requested by the systems subscriber.